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I recently found myself describing this book as "the literary equivalent of tasing Bono." More or less apt, although actually tasing Bono would be more fun.

Anyway: okay, I'm more or less convinced. Moyo makes a convincing case that aid is not helping in Africa. It fosters corruption, with billions of unsupervised dollars up for grabs, and it destroys local economies, keeping Africa in a state of helplessness. Moyo loses me a bit on the solutions end; when she talks about the international bond market, I...well, I don't really know what that means and she doesn't explain it well enough. (Your results may vary if you're not as dumb as me.) The general idea is that instead of waiting for handouts, Africa should join the global economy; Moyo points out that plenty of developing countries, including a few in Africa, have done that with much better results than relying on aid.

I wish she'd included a few case studies about specific countries in Africa, maybe some that have failed and some that have succeeded (at least a little)using different methods. Instead she refers repeatedly to a fictional country; why not be real? The book's only 150 pages long, it's not like she didn't have room.

But still: overall, she's made her case well.

Will it change anything? I doubt it. There's a lot of political work to make a change as radical as turning aid off, and there's Bono on the other side. China is way ahead of us here, and I think the most likely story is that Africa ends up pulling itself up with their help more than ours, with the result that Africa ends up more Chinese than Western at the end of the process. Which is...fine? I guess?